budhalite

David, I have a fireface, and love it, but how would you A/B the fireface vs the ensemble purely based on sound quality of the converters? I'm curious, as I'm interested in the new Duet from apogee..... David

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly....... Classic spaghetti western, amazing score.

PT makes this option cost an extra $500, and it does not come with HD or mixplus (or LE either), you have to purchase it separetly. If the studio does a lot of sound work for film or TV than they probably have it. But if they just do audio sessions, they may not have it. It's quite annoying that PT makes it cost extra to send sessions using OMF, when just about every other DAW includes this ability....... You'll need to double check with the studio to make sure that they have it. Many large scale pro studios don't bother getting it.

Running to Stand Still

I've read about doing that for mastering (compressing the mid and expanding the sides for instance). From what I understand, M/S and LR signals can be swapped back and forth fairly easily. As to how to do it in Logic, I'm hazarding a guess by saying try the direction mixer on a stereo track that contains a regular LR stereo file. By hitting the MS button, it should decode it to MS. Now the tricky part..............it will be MS with the mid on the left and the sides on the right. In order to try processing them separately, you'd have to either use some kind of stereo plug in (say a compressor) that allows you to tweak the left and right separately. Or you could try bouncing out through the direction mixer into separate (non-interleaved) L and R files (which will have mid on the L and sides on the R). Then re-import the files onto two separate tracks to process them differently. I tend to leave the mastering to a mastering engineer but you could try that and see how it works out. Let me know........I'm curious to see if it would work.

It's easy to use and already set up to decode an M/S matrix. Make sure that the track is stereo, not mono, and that the mid microphone is on the left side and that the side microphone is on the right (if the input were set to 1-2, mid on 1, side on 2)

Here's a few ideas.......... I really like my matched pair of Peluso CMEC6 mics. They are really one of the best pairs of small diaphragm condensers for under $1200. And in fact, you can usually find a set on ebay through SoundPure for around $600 (new). I would highly recommend saving up for these if you are thinking about going any cheaper than that. The one cheaper mic that I could recommend would be to find a pair of Octava MC-012's (about $100-150 each). These are not nearly as good as the Pelusos but are the best "cheap" mic that I've tried. I little bit of a bump in the low end doesn't make them the best acoustic guitar mics, but not bad. They are GREAT tom tom mics though......... The next step up from the Pelusos would be to get a matched pair of old 70's (or 80's) Gefell 692s on ebay with either the m70 capsules or the m94 capsules if you want that really bright hyped thing. A pair will usually be about $1000 using Buy It Now and they also get bought that way before the auction ends. I have a pair with the m58 omni capsules which are really awesome as room mics, overheads, acoustic guitar mics. Of course you will get a lot more bleed from the room with the omnis so you have to know how to use them. but they sound amazing. But the m70 or m94 cardiod capsules are also really great. The Pelsuos actually have a much tighter pattern, so if you want something that won't pick up a lot bleed they are excellent. I have pairs of all three of these mics and can recommend owning all of them. I use the Pelusos and Gefells all the time for acoustic guitar, drum overheads, room mics, piano mics, etc. The Pelusos are more colored than the Gefells (the Gefells just sound unbelievably realistic, but they are still "big" sounding), but the Pelusos are colored in a good way. Another option is a matched set of Earthworks SR77 cardiods (about $1600 if I'm not mistaken). These are super realistic. They literally sound like you are there. Of course if the room isn't that great or the source has a few weird frequencies, they will faithfully reproduce these in all their "glory". I would personally choose my Gefells over the Earthworks 9 times out of 10, but that's more of a personality/subjective thing, and not a reflection of the quality of the sound. I tend to find that ruler flat thing to be a bit boring, but if you are working on jazz or classical, it's pretty nice. I find them to be a bit thin on the low end for overheads, but on a big acoustic guitar they sound fantastic. Lots of detail........... Anyway, hope this helps. I highly recommend spending a bit more to at least grab the Pelusos, rather that spend $200-300 on some cheaper pair that you will grow out of pretty quickly.

Hey, I'm running the same setup. I think that the meters in logic are just set up differently. They seem to register the low level stuff "below" the meter. Where 0 on the FF meters is at the top since this is the max level you would want to see hitting the converters, 0 on the logic meters is about a 1/4 of the way down. There are a bunch of posts about the headroom in Logic, but the long and short of it is that you can go way above 0 in Logic due to the 32-bit floating point math. However, you can't have your master fader go above 0 or you will get digital distortion. Suffice it to say, look at the values at the top of the logic meters. If you are recording where your peaks are hitting close to 0 on the logic meter you are doing it right. However, depending on the source material you should give a little more headroom and have your average peaks hitting around -3 or so. More if you've got something that has a wide dynamic range (snare/kick), less if you've got something that has a smaller dynamic range (distorted guitar) and or built in peak limiting or compression.

camillo........sounds like you are headed in the right direction. You can always tweak the eq/comp to your liking. I tend to back off a bit on the comp ratio and threshold depending on what I'm going for. Depending on what the drums are having to sit along with you might experiment with also doing a slight boost around 5-6k if you want to give the drums more agression to cut through a wall of distorted guitars. David...........hadn't really thought about just using the aux on it's own, which makes prefectly logical sense. I guess i like to think of my effects all being on bus tracks so that I don't have to think about where they are located. Also, that way it's right next to the first drum bus.

essentially what you are winding up doing using this method is a sort of defacto multiband compression on the drums where the low end and the high end are more compressed than the body of the kit. when you mix in just a bit of it, it brings out the thump and also the detail of the various peices of the kit. in a way, once you figure it out, it's actually easier than using a multiband and you've got more control. one thing I would add which I mean to try: the website uses a low shelf from 100 down..... you may want to add in a low cut before the compressor and drop off everything from say about 37 hz and below on a medium curve (try 18 or 24) this will keep the ultra lows from muddying things up and freaking out the compressor (ie it will keep the low end "tight" but still "punchy") this way you are essentially only boosting the low end that actually adds fattness.......

1. take all of your drum tracks and change the outputs from 1-2 to a bus track (I usually use 9 for consistancy and because I like to put my reverbs and delays on 1-8 but you can use whatever you want). Use your normal compression and maybe eq to get a good sound (sometimes I use Waves Renassaince Comp, sometimes PSP Vintage Warmer, sometimes just Logic Limiter depending on what I'm going for) 2. now, to set up a parallel "fattening" bus, use Aux track 1 (or create a new one if you are already using the default 1 and 2 that are already created) - set it's input as Bus 9 (or whichever bus you used for step 1) and set it's output for bus 10 (or whichever one is next to the one you chose for step 1) 3. now you have a parallel bus set up on bus 10 - turn the fader all the way down 4. compress and eq as per the website link (that's a decent description of settings to start with) 5. you will likely need to only turn up the fader to about -24dB at most to hear the "fattening" much more than this will probably flatten things out too much.

Try it on overheads and/or room mics. Sure, it's a little punchy in the mids if you solo it by itself, but it will definatley sound great in the track..........

Most Rocking: Queen - "It's Late" (the 2nd to the last track off of News of the World) Huge sound, amazing playing/performances, warmest/punchiest recording. Most Beautiful: Radiohead - "The Tourist" (last track on OK Computer) Gorgeous melodies, enveloping sounds, soaring..... Most Indy: The Pixies - "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven" (7th track on Doolittle) beautiful and raw at the same time, weird backgrounds, cool arrangements Most Creepy: David Bowie - "Big Brother" (2nd to the last track off of Diamond Dogs) huge weirdo instrumentation, wacked out sounds, dark lyrics Best Production (Albums): The Flaming Lips - "The Soft Bulletin", Radiohead - "Ok Computer", U2 - "The Unforgettable Fire", Soundgarden - "Superunknown"............oye, too many more...........

I've been running my FF800 and my external fw800 drive off of the same fw800 buss on my Powerbook for a while with no problems. I tried separating them between the 800 and the 400 buss but it didn't run as smoothly.....

you can generally find a matched pair of Gefell m70/692's on ebay for around a $1000 buy it now. They tend to get sold at that price rather than at auction, but sometimes you can get them for less. I own a pair of Gefell 692 bodies with the m58 omni caps. Couldn't be happier. Amazing sounding mics.